Watch Over Me
by Tahllydarling
Summary: He's always there, she can't see him but she can sense him... Clint finds himself unable to walk away after saving a rival agent, she wonders what it is that keeps him close. Six months after New York, alone and with nobody to turn to, he shows up on her doorstep and learns that there is more to her than meets the eye. Hawkeye/OC.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: _I don't own Hawkeye, I just occasionally like to play with him. _

_Just an idea that rattled around in my head until I wrote it down. First attempt in a long time so feedback welcomed!_

**Watch Over Me**

Titian walked slowly down the stairs toward the garden and looked out of the window. Dusk had fallen and the sun was sinking behind the buildings that surrounded the one she called home sending fiery red and orange rays into the darkening sky. She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of a summer night in the city and the night-blooming roses that thrived below her window. He was there. He was always there. He had been there every night since she returned from the hospital; she could feel his presence in her bones and in her blood.

Sometimes when she stood at this particular window she would fancy that she caught a glimpse of him in the shadows, her silent, stoic, guardian angel. He was all that she had right now, her anchor in the most unlikely of places. Without him she would have died when her employers had sent a cleaning crew out to dispatch her after a high-profile job, a cleaning crew she had barely escaped from. He had saved her life, getting her the medical attention she needed. Without him she would have been entirely alone during these last months. She owed him a debt and she didn't like to leave such things unpaid.

She pushed open the French windows and let the warm night air embrace her as she listened to the sound of sirens wailing and cars rushing by beyond the garden walls. She'd always loved the sultry heat of the city at night and no other city had the same flavour as Los Angeles. "You might as well come out," she called softly, "I know you're there."

For a long moment there was no sound, not a movement that confirmed she was correct and he had been there watching her, but then she saw him step gracefully out of the shadows. As always Barton was dressed in black, she'd never seen him in anything else; whether he was in his suit or in his casual gear, black was the only colour he frequented. Tonight he was clad in black denim and a T-shirt that did absolutely nothing to hide the toned perfection of his arms; in his right hand he carried a black leather jacket. Within the folds of the coat she knew that he held the compact bow that he was so proficient with and that there was probably a sleeve of arrows concealed there too.

"It's good to see you moving around better," he said softly. Although his words had been spoken quietly, they carried on the air to reach her and they had a force of their own.

Titian shivered despite the balmy air. "Yeah well time and the doctors did a great job on me. I'd say that it won't be long before I'm back to work but then we both know that isn't true..." She offered him a slight smile, making light of the fact that she had no employers who didn't want her dead. She noticed the slight frown that momentarily crossed his features; interesting, he didn't like her flippancy. "Is that why you're here, to protect me?"

"You needed time to heal without watching your back," Barton shrugged. He scanned the confines of the garden before bringing his gaze back to her. She couldn't read what she saw in his face. "I didn't pull you out of that mess only to let you get killed now. Besides, I had nothing else that I had to be doing."

She measured him with steady eyes, assessing the strength and predatory grace in his muscular body. She'd seen bigger men during her time in the field but even through his clothing she could see that Barton was a different kind of muscle entirely, a working muscle born of years spent working with weapons and honing his bow skills. His was the type of muscle that real men had, the type of physique that gave durability and grace rather than just brute strength and the inherent arrogance that seemed to go with it.

"You should really consider another career path if your agency have so little work for you," Titian remarked casually, turning to examine one of her rose bushes. "If you've got time to watch over me, you've got time to be working for multiple players don't you think?"

"This isn't about work Titian," he murmured, " so quit pushing my buttons."

A small fire took root in her, warmth flooding through her skin as she absorbed the words that he had offered her. It was a larger comfort to her than he could possibly know to know that he was there out of preference rather than duty. It was the kind of thing that made her consider the possibility that they might, one day, enjoy more than a professional relationship. For someone who didn't care for such things, she was surprised by how amenable she was to the idea of them sharing something more than conversation.

As if he sensed the tide of her thoughts, Barton stepped towards her, forcing her to face him fully. Up close she could see the way his steel grey eyes roiled like storm clouds, was he anxious, frustrated or feeling something else entirely? Standing so close to her own, the heat of his body called to hers, an involuntary response that was more chemical than consciousness. She wanted him she realised with no small amount of surprise and judging by the way he looked at her, he wanted her too.

"So if this isn't work..." she murmured, raising her gaze to his, deliberately staring at him through the fringe of her lashes. Barton seemed to momentarily lose his train of thought, his eyes tracing the curve of her shoulder and then the column of her throat as they travelled to meet her own.

"It's personal," he replied, voice barely above a whisper. Even standing so close to him she almost missed the words. She almost wished that she had. It was unheard of and impractical for two top flight assassins to get involved with one another; for one thing they worked for rival organisations and for another they would paint a bullseye on each other's backs when their rivals found out about their connection. Simply put, he was a risk that she could not afford to take. He brushed her hair away from her face, leaving trails of fire in his wake."I wanted to make sure that you were okay," he admitted.

"And I am," she replied softly, distancing herself from him and the fire he ignited within her. One moment, that was all it would take for her judgement to lapse. One touch of his lips against hers and they would both be damned. She stepped back, turning her back on him and the heat in his eyes, forcing herself to walk away even though every cell in her body burned for him. She headed back into the house, "thanks to you."


	2. Chapter 2

There was no way to avoid the inevitable. Once destiny sets a course, all that can be done is walk it to its inevitable conclusion. For most of her life Titian had railed against the thought that there was such a concept as destiny, believing wholeheartedly that it was the weight of decisions made that governed the course of the future. She'd been raised to believe that an invisible, unseen force could not be blamed for the weight of poor choices. That of course had been before Clint Barton had saved her life.

She had known what Barton's future held the moment his skin had come into contact with her own and it was that knowledge that had stopped her from giving in to the feelings that had threatened to overcome her a year ago when he had approached her in LA. That night, when he had leaned in to whisper in her ear, fingers warm against her cheek, she had tasted his pain like copper pennies and fresh blood on her tongue and known that something was coming. She could feel the certainty of his fate as she walked away from him and had known that there would be a time when they would be together but that it was not then. She had never imagined the circumstances that would cause them to meet again.

Three nights earlier she had opened the door to her home to find him on her doorstep. The man who looked at her through red rimmed eyes was not the man she remembered. Physically he was the same, though he held himself with the stiffness of a man who had taken a critical blow to the chest and was struggling to keep moving. It was not the man who had looked after her when her employer had tried to have her killed, this was a man that she might have feared had she had any doubts about the type of man he was. It hadn't stopped her from welcoming him into her home though when he had told her, somewhat falteringly, that he hadn't known where else to go.

He had been in New York during the summer, she knew because she had seen him on the news footage that had emerged during the attack. Instinct had her moving before her brain caught up and acknowledged that even if she made it to the city, which given the panic would have been hard enough, there was no way for her to know whether he would have wanted to see her, no way of knowing whether he and his team mates would see her as friend or foe. Instead she had spent twenty-four hours wearing a track into the rug in her bedroom while she watched the TV and prayed that he made it out alive.

Despite knowing that it was a risk to take him in, that at any time his partner or his bosses could turn up on her doorstep, she hadn't hesitated to help him. He had come to her for a reason, running from the people with whom he would usually spend his time, and she wouldn't, she couldn't turn him away. They had both walked in worlds that most could not begin to imagine, seen and done things beyond the comprehension of most people and when the chips were down they both knew that it was easier to strike first and deal with the consequences later so she knows why he chose her when he needed someone to watch his back. If he couldn't fall apart in front of his colleagues, she was the next best choice and he'd already shown that he trusted her.

She had no idea of the finer points of what had happened to him, other than what she had been able to glean from what he said during his nightmares, when his yells were loud enough to potentially wake the neighbours, but the reasons for his instability didn't matter. Experience had told her that there were countless ways to break a man, physical, psychological and emotional, whichever applied she would be there for him as long as he needed her.

Where once he had watched over her, now she would watch over him until he was strong enough to face the world again.


	3. Chapter 3

He sat in the darkness of the lounge, glass all over the floor from the mirrors that he had shattered, hands still bleeding from the destruction. Titian stepped from the shadows, diamond bright shards crunching beneath her boots as she moved towards him. He didn't look up until she stopped a few feet away from him and when he did the pain that she saw in his eyes was staggering.

She had known the moment she arrived back at the house that all was not well, the quality of the silence that permeated the house enough to set her on edge and have her reaching for her dagger. A finely tuned sense of her surroundings had helped her to survive so long and she never ignored her instincts. She'd known the moment she stepped into the room and saw him however that the knife would not be needed. It wasn't difficult to imagine what had happened to cause such destruction, nor was it the first time that one of her mirrors had suffered the consequences of his panic. She didn't care about the mirrors, physical possessions meant little to her, but she was concerned about his injuries.

He was on the very edges of himself, she could see it when his eyes met hers. She saw it in the way he didn't hold her gaze but went back to staring at the floor, arms braced tightly against his knees, muscles standing out in sharp relief against his tanned skin. Tonight, she could tell that he was fighting with everything in him to stay firmly tethered to the world around him but he was struggling for reference points. When she wasn't sure what he was seeing when he looked at her, she knew that she needed to draw him back to himself somehow. She needed to show him that she was not a threat to him. That alone made her more cautious in her approach.

"Was it your eyes again?" she asked quietly. A few nights earlier he had put his fist through the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet after waking from a nightmare and momentarily believing that Loki had taken control of him again. When he didn't answer, she moved closer, reaching out to lay a hand on his arm, even though she knew it would likely startle him and possibly bring him up fighting. "Barton?"

He jerked back as if he had been burned, staring in horror at his hands and the blood that covered them as if seeing it for the first time. Shaking his head as if to clear it, he returned his gaze to her face. The moonlight that flooded in through the French doors only highlighted how pale his face was and made the dark circles under his eyes seem more pronounced. She had never seen him look so lost. "Did I hurt you?" he asked brokenly, eyes filled with panic and remorse.

Crouching at his side, she ignored the glass that sliced into the skin of her knees and put herself directly in his line of sight. She gently took his blood covered hands, carefully avoiding the glass shards that she could see and sliding her palms over his skin until she could close her fingers around his wrists, giving her a good hold on him. Fingers curling over his pulse, she applied even pressure, which Barton returned with a desperate grip on her own wrists. She couldn't say why it was that this particular touch calmed him, why feeling her heartbeat seemed to soothe him more than a hand to the shoulder or any other touch, but she didn't question it. He didn't need consolation, though the time for that would come later when this crisis had passed, he needed her to be strong, and that was what she intended to be.

"I'm sorry," he whimpered, holding her gaze but seeming to look through her "I should go."

"Oh yeah, and where will you go?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "You didn't hurt me Barton. You've never hurt me. You aren't going anywhere until I fix your hands up, after that I'll make some coffee and we can talk it out."

He allowed her to raise him up from the floor, stepping carefully across the broken glass with his bare feet, and followed her to the kitchen. He sat meekly on the counter, lost in thought as she collected the supplies that she would need to treat his wounds and then sat placidly while she cleansed and wrapped his hands in clean bandages. Not for the first time Titian found herself thankful for the medical training she'd gathered over the years. While she disposed of the tiny glass shards and that she had dug out of his skin and the bloodstained antiseptic wipes, he said nothing. Only when she guided him to one of the bar stools and placed a mug of strong coffee in front of him, did he speak.

"I'm sorry about the mirrors," he exclaimed, sounding a little more like himself, a little more composed. For the first time since she had led him out of the carnage that now made up her lounge, he looked her directly in the face.

Titian tutted, tucking her hair behind her ear as she pulled up the seat beside him. "I don't care about the mirrors," she snorted, "I'm not the kind of woman who spends a whole lot of time looking in the damn things anyway. You might have noticed but I don't spend a lot of time preening, not much point when you're in our line of work."

"Guess not," he admitted, turning the mug around in circles on the tabletop. "Is this the part where you try to force me to talk about what's going on with me?"

She could sense his reluctance, the brittle fragility that seemed to make up so much of him after one of his 'episodes'. Trying to force him to talk would be a futile effort, he would talk when he was ready and until then she would get nothing from him. He needed to make sense of things himself before he could vocalise them to her. "I very much doubt that I could force you to do anything," she replied evenly, "but that's not why I'm not pushing you." She saw his head snap up, his gaze study her face as if trying to seek out the meaning of her words. "You'll talk if and when you feel ready," she explained, "and if you decide that it's me you want to talk to, I'll be here."

Barton's hand slid across the counter to rest atop her own, a thank you unspoken. "You're quite a woman, you know..." he said softly, a slight smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

She laughed, a genuine sound of amusement that cut through the silence of the night. "Well you've known that since the first time we met," she chuckled, "I seem to recall you telling me something similar then while I was spitting curses at you like a hell cat, convinced that you were there to kill me and not to save my ass."

Barton let loose a dry chuckle of his own. "Oh I haven't forgotten it," he told her, "still got the scar from that damn hunting knife of yours. Just quit pushing my buttons would you?" He stopped, squeezed her hand slightly and then returned his palm to his coffee mug, withdrawing the warmth that he had given her. "That's not the way I mean it tonight and you know it ."


	4. Chapter 4

The sound of sirens woke him in the early hours, bringing him out of a light sleep and forcing him upwards to sit among the tangled covers of the bed; it made an almost pleasant change from the sound of his own yelling. The darkness was a welcome respite from the pain of the headache that was now his almost constant companion. Rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, he tried to get his bearings, cataloguing the now familiar furniture and fittings and finding nothing amiss. He knew that he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep

Swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress, he padded across the room to sit on the window seat and watch the rain running down the glass. This room, this house, felt safe to him, almost like a home after so many months of running from the horrors in his head and finding no relief. Here, he found a place that he could rest, where the thoughts that whirled in his mind could condense and find some sort of coherence.

He hadn't known what to expect when he had turned up on her doorstep, not after the way things had been left between them the year before, but he was glad that he had turned to her in his time of need. While his colleagues and friends would have looked at him with pity, wondering how a man such as himself could be so lost and so utterly broken by an enemy who had been vanquished and sent back to Asgard in chains, Titian still treated him like an equal. When he was feeling okay, she acted as though the events in New York hadn't happened, and when he was less than stable, she just seemed to know exactly how best to deal with him.

During the daylight he could cope better, he could lock away the self-hate and the shards of memory that still had the power to slice at him, but at night the lunatic still haunted his dreams, leaving him strung out, sleep deprived and constantly balanced between a state of anxiety and exhaustion. The thoughts that entered his head in the small hours of the morning were alien to him, so alien that he sometimes questioned whether they were his own or whether they had been somehow planted there by Loki and were only now beginning to surface. The dreams were so vivid, so real, that he would wake convinced that there was blood on his hands, that there was a shadow looming over him, and that he couldn't trust himself around people.

Resting his forehead against the cool glass, Barton watched the garden below, thinking back as he often did to the nights he had spent out there watching over the woman who now offered him his only anchor. The first time he had set eyes on her had been in a file handed to him by Maria Hill. The orders were clear, Titian was all over SHIELD's radar, making quite a name for herself, and they needed to know where her allegiances lay. If she could be convinced to defect to their own payroll, they would allow her to live, if not they would consider her a threat and she would have to be eliminated. She was a ghost, her identity and location hidden behind layers of security, but he had eventually managed to track her down during a job in Chicago.

It had been another rainy night and he had tracked her to an alleyway in a less than respectable area of the city. From the rooftop of a museum building, he watched her taking down a mob henchman who was both bigger than her and heavily armed. Despite the rain, she moved like a dancer, predatory grace and deadly beauty showcased in every movement as she systematically took her opponent apart before walking away into the night. From that moment he had understood why SHIELD were wary of her. He had also known that she would not be easy to get close to.

He tracked her for a month, learning her techniques, assessing her fighting style, learning her weaknesses, while he prepared to make his move and then fate handed him a curve ball. Titian's employers somehow discovered SHIELD's interest in their assassin and decided to terminate her employment, permanently. Had he not been following her and helped her, she could have been killed, had he not rushed her to the hospital that night, she would have probably bled out. He had kept watch over her while she healed, giving her time before she would have to defend herself, getting to know her through her habits and the snippets of conversation they shared and he had come to respect her. The experience had formed a bond between them, one that neither of them really understood, but it had also saved her life in the eyes of his employers. As long as he could keep tabs on her, they would leave her in peace.

Movement in the corner of the walled garden caught his eye and he shifted, turning his head to get a better view. Someone was down there, keeping to the shadows, someone big. His instincts flared to life as he considered the points of entry for the building and the weapons that he had to hand in the room. He was off the seat and moving toward the door before his brain had time to catch up with him, determined that nobody would intrude on the sanctuary he had found here or harm his host.

Titian stood at the top of the stairs, fully dressed in her fighting leathers and a black vest despite the lateness of the hour. In her left hand she held the katana, still in its sheath, that usually occupied pride of place on the wall in her bedroom. Without turning she held up her hand to indicate he should stay quiet, her eyes remaining fixed on the shadows downstairs. Moving to her side, he followed the line of her gaze and watched as the figure moved closer, instincts twitching with the need to act.

"It's okay," she announced, as the figure appeared at the French doors, tapping lightly on the glass. "I know him."

Keeping the sword at hand, she skipped lightly down the stairs to open the doors, admitting the drenched figure and locking the door behind him. From the landing, Barton did a quick assessment of the guy and realised that judging by the way he moved and the size of his body, he was an extremely dangerous individual, an assessment which did not change when he dropped a sports bag and removed his leather jacket to reveal broad shoulders beneath a tight black muscle shirt that were roped in heavy muscle. In terms of build he reminded him of Thor, only if it was possible this guy might have been even bigger than the Asgardian. Freed of the coat, the man enveloped Titian in a hug, which she returned, seemingly pleased to see him. For a moment he entertained a surge of jealousy, wondering whether the man before him was the reason that Titian had pulled away from him the previous year, but he quickly dismissed the idea when he saw how they moved with one another. It was obvious that they cared for one another but equally obvious that they weren't involved.

As if he sensed another pair of eyes on him, the guy turned and stared up to where Barton stood, sharp eyes performing their own assessment. Titian followed the movement, judging the emotional currents which suddenly surged in the room, and laid a hand on his forearm, a warning. "He's a friend," she explained, "and he's here by my choice."

The tension bled out of the room. Almost all of the aggression that the stranger had been radiating disappeared and that fiercely intelligent gaze turned from suspicious to contemplative. "This the guy that saved you last year?" he asked, voice a deep baritone, laced with an accent that sounded curiously exotic and a lot like Titian's own. At her nod of confirmation, he raised a hand to his chest, placing it palm down over his heart and gave Barton a slight bow of his head.

Titian snorted, "so now you'll show him respect but if he was just some guy I was hooking up with you'd want to tear him limb from limb?" With a shake of her head, she slapped the guy on the arm before turning away and gesturing for Barton to come down the stairs and join them. It didn't escape his notice that those eyes stayed on him all the way down the stairs, shrewdly assessing the way he moved and coming to some sort of decision about him, it bothered him just a little that he had no idea what that decision was. It also didn't escape his notice that Titian kept her gaze on him until he came to a stop in front of the other man. "Barton meet V," she exclaimed, making the introductions, "V, Clint Barton, the guy who saved my ass last year."

V extended his hand, engulfing Barton's own as they shook. His grip was firm but not the bone crushing display of dominance that Clint might have expected. "Good to meet you man, Tish told me what you did for her. You have my thanks."

"What are you doing here anyway?" she asked, when the two men had released their grip on one another. "Turning up at three in the morning and skulking around my garden is the fastest way to get yourself killed, especially when there are two of us with excellent aim under the same roof."

V gave Clint a look that suggested he was filing that information away for future use and then turned his gaze to the woman who had now set aside the katana and moved to his side. "I don't skulk," he growled before fixing her with a grin "I prowl." The smile he gave her was slightly predatory but it was hard to imagine any expression not having a lethal edge on a face that seemed to bleed aggression. "You said you couldn't pick up your order so I decided to be a nice guy and deliver."

For the first time Clint turned his attention back to the bag that had sat largely forgotten on the floor by the door and wondered what kind of delivery Titian could be waiting on that would be couriered by a man like the one in front of him. None of the possibilities that came to mind were good.

"Bring it through to the kitchen," she instructed, gesturing towards the door. As V took off in that direction, the bag slung casually over one shoulder, she reached out and laced her fingers with Barton's pulling him along with her. "Don't worry," she told him quietly as they walked side by side, "he might look and act like a bad ass but he's family. He's the genius responsible for my weaponry."

Beneath the bright kitchen lights, V had set out an impressive array of weapons on the counter top. Titian released Barton's hand when they reached the doorway and moved closer, her eyes roving with open admiration over the handguns, daggers, throwing stars and ammunition before her. Clint shared her approval of the arsenal V had been carrying in that sports bag, every weapon was beautifully made and adorned with the intricate designs that were Titian's trademark. In all his years with SHIELD, where no expense was spared on research and design, he had never seen anything like what lay before him now. If V had made or modified all of these, then he was clearly a master craftsman.

"You like?" V asked, voice rumbling through the quiet of the room and breaking the spell that the weapons had cast over them all. There was something in those eyes that told Barton he was supremely confident that the weapons would be exactly what she had wanted. This was a man who took pride in his work.

"Perfection," she replied, a slow smile forming on her lips. She traced her long, elegant fingers over the grip of one of the modified .45s. Lifting the gun, she turned it, testing its weight against her palm, then held it out toward toward Barton so that he could see it more clearly. "I've been using Matchmasters for years," eyes back on the gun she explained further, "V customises them for me, adjusts the weight so that they match my specifications and sit just right in my hand. Plus he does all the engraving that you've seen on my stuff."

"You do it all by hand?" Barton asked, flipping his surprised gaze to the big man on the other side of the table. V nodded, shrugging those massive shoulders.

"Gives me something to do in my downtime," he replied, before continuing with a chuckle. "I like to know that my girl here is well taken care of when she's out and she likes her weaponry to match her tats, only the best for her."

Titian laughed off his remarks and earned a smile from V. She nodded her head toward him, "V's an artist. Nobody else does things the way he does."

V's midnight blue eyes, lifted to meet Barton's own, shrewd, such intellect burning there that Barton felt as though the man could see right inside him and read every thought he'd ever had. It was more than a little intimidating. "How bout you man, what's your weapon of choice?"

Over an hour later as the sun began to rise over the buildings surrounding theirs, the three of them emerged from the kitchen. Conversation had flowed with surprising ease once the initial awkwardness had passed them by. Titian had made tea for them all and they had sat together, weighing the merits of different weapons, particularly the different types of bow that allowed an archer speed and precision. As the conversation had developed, they had moved from tea to beer and then from beer to vodka or bourbon. He had discovered that Titian and V had been raised and trained by the same man, and that they were half-siblings. She had described their relationship as considering themselves to be family by blood as well as by choice. By the time it was decided that V would be crashing there, the big guy had promised Barton a new bow in thanks for saving his sister the previous year and staying to watch over her afterwards. By the time they headed up to respective bedrooms, he was feeling quite pleasantly mellow from the bourbon he had drunk and ready for sleep.

"The alcohol will help to make sure you stay down for a couple of hours at least," Titian told him as she fell into step beside him on the way up the stairs. "Save you being up all night again."

He stared at her for a second, wondering how long she had been aware of his inability to sleep and whether breaking out the liquor downstairs had been her way of making sure he was relaxed enough to sleep when he went back to bed. Looking behind him, he noticed that V had a similar knowing look in his eye to the one his sister was sporting. He was glad that neither of them were making a big deal out of it.

At the end of a very strange night, he climbed into bed thinking that V, and anyone else who Titian had drawn close and brought into her strange and possibly slightly dysfunctional family, probably shouldn't be judged on first impressions. As he was discovering, Titian and V had their own moral code. As far as he could see the world needed more people like that.


	5. Chapter 5

She woke to the sound of his screams, body moving without conscious thought as she leapt from her bed and moved toward the door. The glow from the full moon poured through the uncovered windows, bathing everything in silvery luminescence and ensuring that she didn't need to switch on the lights to find her way to his side. The sound was too loud in the silence, too close to panic and much as she might have liked to ignore it and go back to sleep, she couldn't.

Dressed in only her sleep shorts and a tank top, she padded barefoot through the house, one of her handguns in her right hand in case of trouble. He wouldn't appreciate the intrusion, that much she knew, but his nightmares were coming thick and fast now, waking them all with disturbing regularity. Titian knew all too well the horror that came from waking from nightmares filled with blood and screaming. She had woken often enough convinced that the blood of her victims was still on her hands, that the wetness on her face was something other than tears.

He sat on the edge of the bed, sheets tangled around his waist, face in his hands. His breathing was heavy in the still confines of the room, chest and shoulders heaving with every inhale, ragged sounds partway between a breath and a sob escaping him. He was once again on the very edges of his stability and one wrong word could shatter him. Struggling for composure, he raked his hands through his hair, leaving it standing off his head at odd angles. Just one touch was all it would take to make him crumble, spilling the pain that gnawed at him across the floor that separated them like a wash of fresh blood.

Suddenly aware of her presence, his head snapped up, muscles tightening as if ready to spring at her until his eyes found her in the dark. "Could have killed you," he reprimanded, there was no heat of anger in his voice. He unclenched his fists with visible effort.

Inclining her gun toward him, she smiled wryly, "likewise darling."

Barton scrambled off the bed, disentangling himself from the covers and pacing around the room as if to reassure himself that his body was still his own to command. Were it not for all the times that she had done something similar, she would have found the actions strange. Titian watched him silently, allowing him to get a grip on his emotions before she made any attempt to approach him. As she watched he forced his breathing to regulate, movements slowing, she wondered whether it was best to stay or give him some privacy. Then he did something completely unexpected.

Slowly, cautiously, he turned and came back across the room towards her, his arms wrapping around her waist and body leaning into her, obviously needing the comfort of having someone close. Titian's first reaction was to pull away, to put as much distance between them as she could so that he wouldn't see the emotions that he stirred in her, but he was there, up against her, so warm, so strong, so terrifyingly close that she couldn't push him away. She saw the cracks and the bloodstains that made the man wrapped around her a force to be reckoned with, the strength, fire and deceptive fragility that were all part and parcel of being human.

It surprised her how quickly she, who hated people getting too close to her, adjusted to his proximity. For the first time since their paths had crossed in that alleyway over a year ago, she realised that they were more alike than anyone would guess, both of them far more damaged than they would ever allow the wider world to see. He didn't speak when she raised her arms and wrapped them around his shoulders, secure and reassuring, and returned his embrace. Murmuring soothing words she moved her palms over the skin of his neck and shoulders trying to ease the tension she could feel in him. She didn't miss the shivers that flickered through him or the rapidly cooling sheen of perspiration on his skin. In that moment more than any other they had shared, she wanted to ease him in whatever way she could.

"You okay?" she asked when a long moment had passed. Barton nodded, face still buried in her shoulder. She waited, letting him decide that he was ready to pull away and stand alone. If she had to, she would have stayed there all night with him just so that he didn't have to face his pain alone.

"Better," he admitted, pulling away from her awkwardly, moving away from her toward the window as if ashamed of his outburst or desperately trying to clear his head. He turned, looking at her over his shoulder to offer her an awkward smile, "thanks."

"You need anything?" she asked, thankful that V had stayed in his room as they'd discussed. Barton didn't need any more of an audience than he had right now, not that V would judge, they'd all walked a mile in those shoes and not particularly cared for them. What she did for Barton now, V had done for her a hundred times or more, and she'd returned the favour to him when they were in the same place and he needed it.

He turned his attention to the desk at the far side of the room and the leather-bound notebook that sat there. "Have you ever had everything you thought you knew about yourself taken away from you?" he asked quietly.

"Until I was eleven I didn't know that my father was my father," she told him. His attention made her nervous but also gave her the strength to keep talking. "V and I were raised knowing that we were half-siblings but we were led to believe that our father was dead. He wasn't. He came and went as he pleased, fighting, hunting, taking jobs wherever he wanted them but he never told us who he really was. He was, is, a recruiter, runs a training camp out in the Ural Mountains where he trains soldiers and assassins for the highest bidder. We thought we were orphans and then we found out that we were wrong. We had known him our whole lives, feared him our whole lives and then we found out the truth..."

"How did you find out?" he asked quietly, watching her intently from where he stood.

"He came back for V," she explained, "got into an argument with our guardian and announced that since V is his son no-one had the power to stop him from taking him to the camps. He was wrong as it turned out. There were a few people who had an interest in making sure that V and I never found ourselves under his iron fist. He calls himself Karei, apparently the name belongs to some sort of thunder deity."

"So how did you get away from him?" Barton asked, absorbed in her story.

Titian shrugged, she'd never told the story before and it felt strange to discuss something so personal with someone outside of the family. "Jago, our guardian, gave us to his sister Siobhan and she took us into hiding. She raised us as her own until Jago came to join us, then they raised us together." She toyed with the pendant around her neck, an old habit that she found almost impossible to break when she spoke of home and her origins. "V and I, we were trained by the best, Jago and Siobhan they were very skilled, Jago helped to train Karei too, they called on everyone they knew to give us the skills we would need to survive our father and his soldiers. We've been quietly picking them off ever since."

"So all the contracts that you took with different agencies, all the different employers..."

"I was very selective," she admitted, "almost every target was a protégée of my father."

"But why?" She knew when she looked at him that he genuinely didn't see the connection, it didn't make her think less of him, one had to meet her father to understand the man's mentality and appreciate his cunning.

"He isn't a man who loses well," she told him, "Jago robbed him of his son, his heir, and made the boy his own. At the first opportunity he gets he'll repay the favour and send one of his soldiers to murder my brother. I won't allow it."

She watched as he sank down onto the edge of the mattress, absorbing the enormity of what she had just shared with him. "That's why you and V live on opposite coasts," he concluded, "so that they can't track you back to one another." She nodded confirming the information.

"I can't allow myself anything that I might want in my life, family, friends, lovers, because my father and his people would hunt them down and kill them, just to hurt me and those I love. Finding out who our father is upended both of our lives and remade them around us in an instant, things have never been the same."She exhaled a deep breath, closing her eyes for a second against the tumult of emotion that tore through her. Straightening her shoulders, folding her arms across her chest she met his gaze. "Well, I showed you mine, now your turn, you were about to say something..."

Barton took a deep breath, steeling himself for whatever he was about to say and she waited silently, afraid to upset the balance between his urge to talk and the obvious desire not to give voice to his thoughts."You know I was in New York last summer?" She nodded to acknowledge that she did. "Before the battle I was... compromised."

"In what way?" she asked, stepping closer but taking care not to spook him. Now that he was talking she didn't want to risk him bottling it all up again.

"There was a deity, an Asgardian, he took away my free will," his voice had dropped, his pain evident in every word that escaped his lips. "I had no choice but to follow him, to spill every secret I knew, give him the details of how to hurt those I worked with the most. He exploited my knowledge of my agency and my friends, turned me against them and made me do things that I'll never forgive myself for."

"But you survived him," she told him gently, sitting opposite him on the edge of the bed and reaching out to lay a hand over his wrist. "Did you have any choice in what was done to you?" she asked.

"Of course not!" Barton's head shot up, disbelief written in his face until he saw the expression on her own and realised that the question wasn't meant to be answered.

"Then don't torture yourself over it," she told him, keeping her tone both calm and firm. "There are enough things in this world that need to be fought without adding the past to the list." Patting his hand with her own, she rose and moved toward the door, turning to look back at him before she stepped out into the hall. "Now if growing up with Siobhan taught me anything it's that good hot chocolate is the solution to all problems that strike between midnight and morning, the woman swore by it."

Titian smiled as he climbed from the mattress, moving across the room toward her outstretched hand with its wriggling fingers. When he took her hand in his, she squeezed his palm and met his eyes. "I don't think less of you Barton and you shouldn't think less of yourself," she tugged him toward the top of the stairs.

"You really are quite a woman," he told her, repeating the words that had almost become a routine between them in his weak moments.

"So you keep telling me," she laughed, glancing back at him over her shoulder as they skipped down the stairs toward the kitchen.


	6. Chapter 6

The morning before V was due to leave L.A., Barton witnessed his first training session between the siblings. It was still early when he woke up, the sun creeping up over the surrounding buildings, but the sounds of fighting had been unmistakable. From the balcony he watched them with interest, understanding from nothing more than the careful way in which they moved and the exhilaration on their faces that what was going on below him was all in good fun. Had they not been smiling, he might have believed that they were trying to kill each other.

Although her brother had at least a foot in height and maybe a hundred pounds in weight to his advantage, Titian more than made up for his size in her speed and agility. The brutality of their conflict stole his breath, every fibre of his being worrying about what would happen if V actually landed a punch from those huge fists of his or Titian connected with one of her powerful kicks. He needn't have worried, they were so well matched that they could have been opposite sides of the same personality. Years of training together would do that; he knew because that was how he and Natasha had been before Loki had come into their lives.

Laughter rang out through the room, its silvery echoes climbing to the rafters of the open space and drawing his attention to Titian's face. His jaw fell open, eyes unable to process what he was seeing. Her eyes were closed, fists and feet still flying, blows landing with textbook precision and being blocked by V's quick reflexes. How was it possible that she could fight like that without being able to see what was coming at her, how did she avoid his blows?

Caught in the spell of their movement, he slowly descended the staircase, eyes never leaving the violent dance that was unfolding below him. It wasn't the first time that he had seen Titian fight, in the months that he had tracked her he must have seen her dozens of times. It was obvious watching her now that she had always been holding back though, he had never seen her cut loose like this with any of her targets. The thought that she had such reserves untapped, frightened him a little and made him respect her in a way that he had truly respected few people.

"Hey, look who's awake," V called, noticing Clint's descent down the staircase. Titian's head whipped around to face him, eyes sparkling with something just a bit feral, skin flushed and glowing from the exertion of the fight. She danced on the balls of her feet as her dark hair settled around her shoulders, the length of her ponytail falling down her back and the free ends settling around her face. Barton felt his breath catch for a very different reason; she had never looked more beautiful to him. "How you feeling my man?"

Several days had passed since the worst of his nightmares, the night that Titian had came into his room to calm him, and he had been a bit shaky in the days that followed. Though they didn't make a big deal of his mental state, or its apparent fragility, either Titian or her brother always made a point of asking him how he was feeling at some point during the day. The truth was that he was feeling much better, the nightmares were receding and sleep was coming more easily. He knew that it had a lot to do with his location and the nature of people who had made him so welcome there.

"I'm good," he replied, "sleeping better."

"You feel up for some training? She tells me that you can hold your own but I've been dying to put you through your paces," there was a glint in V's eye and something in the grin that bloomed on his face that made Barton feel vaguely uncomfortable. The big guy had become a friend since his arrival but the part of his brain that sized up opponents never forgot the man in front of him would be a formidable adversary. Luckily, a formidable adversary could also provide an interesting challenge. Rolling his shoulders to loosen them up, he stepped off the last step and moved toward the mats where V waited expectantly.

Titian's voice distracted him. "If you plan on taking him up on that offer, you'll need to warm up before you two tangle with one another. Fresh out of bed is not the right frame of mind to step into a training session with a man who's already gone a couple of rounds," she told him, ever the voice of common sense. Meeting her brother's gaze, she inclined her head and Barton once again had the distinct feeling that they were communicating with one another without words. Finally she spoke again, "V, why don't you go and brew me a pot of coffee while I warm him up for you?"

Left alone with Titian, he began to wonder just what he had let himself in for. He watched her stretch out her arms, rolling her neck from side to side and realised that to her a 'warm up round' would probably be equivalent to an entire work out against some of the agents he knew. To her credit she started slowly, performing the same stretches that he did, pulling her punches before they connected with him, letting him find her rhythm and adjust his own accordingly. She fought a lot like Natasha, a fluid mixture of martial arts, gymnastics and blows that would have made his head ring like a bell if she had meant them. It wasn't often that he found an opponent that he truly felt he could cut loose with, even rarer for the person in question to be female, but he suspected as she put him through his paces that he had very possibly met his match.

"When you and V get into it bear in mind that he's faster than he looks," she told him, twisting out of his hold and dancing out of reach. She was only slightly out of breath. "He might be big but he has speed that most people don't expect from him."

"Yeah I saw that," he replied, dodging a martial arts kick that came his way. Titian smiled, firing off an impressive series of body blows and boxing shots. He tracked her movement, taking in the details, noticing the way that she taped her knuckles for combat and the way her hair bounced, whipping out wide of her head as she spun for another kick. Catching her ankle and pulling her off-balance, he was rewarded with another of those laughs, right before she threw herself into him and took him down to the mat, pinning him momentarily beneath her slighter weight.

"Now you're getting it," she told him with a smile, "but I wouldn't recommend trying something like that with my brother, if he takes you down to the floor, you'll have your work cut out to get back to your feet. He loves the ground game and he's good at it, stay one step ahead of him though and he'll get frustrated, frustration makes him sloppy."

"Good to know." He watched her as she turned her head toward the kitchen door, fondness evident in her eyes and tried to ignore the fact that she was still straddling his hips. How would her brother react if he saw them like this? His guess - not well. "You guys train together often?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

Titian nodded, springing to her feet and reaching down to help him up from the mat. "We grew up fighting with one another, trying out new moves and new techniques on each other, without him I wouldn't be half the fighter I am. We still train together every day when we're in the same place."

Every day? Barton began to wonder how he hadn't noticed the training that they'd been doing since they'd all been living under the same roof. He was about to ask her when she turned her head in his direction and looked at him.

"We've been training late night or early morning so that we didn't disturb you," she explained. "We learned a long time ago that to train anywhere but at home draws more attention than we're comfortable with. Running and cardio are fine but anything that involves real combat is best done behind closed doors – unless it's weapon work in which case we sometimes use the garden..."

"Weapon work?" he asked, wondering if the room was actually spinning around him or whether he was about to pass out. Though he'd seen the weaponry that V had delivered when he arrived, he hadn't seen any of those weapons in use. Having had his heart in his mouth watching them fight with nothing but fists and feet, he couldn't imagine the spectacle of the brother and sister pair taking one another on whilst armed.

Titian shrugged casually, "knives, axes, swords, staffs... you know, the usual."

Knives and guns were the usual for agents at SHIELD, they were trained with other things and everybody had their own preferences when it came to weaponry – his bow and Thor's hammer to name but two examples - but he'd never really considered a sword to be a practical combat choice. Filled with a sudden hunger to develop new skills during his time in her home, he wondered whether she would consider teaching him. When V went home, would she let him take her brother's place as her training partner? He didn't get the chance to ask her before V came back, carrying a small tray complete with a coffee pot, sugar bowl and Titian's favourite cup. He set it down on the coffee table at the side of the room and turned toward Barton as his sister slipped away to perch daintily on the arm of one of the sofas that had been moved to clear the floor space.

"You ready?" V asked, that low powerful voice carrying in the quiet.

"Guess so," Barton replied, casting a brief glance in Titian's direction and finding her watching him as she stirred her coffee. She offered him a wink and a small smile, a slight nod of encouragement buoying him up and making him believe that he at least stood a chance of holding his own against V. As her brother moved forward she called out a string of words in a language that Barton didn't speak, her voice seeming to caress each syllable of the unfamiliar words. It wasn't Russian but it was something close, Eastern European maybe? V's eyebrows rose slightly in surprise but quickly recovered and nodded in response to whatever she had said to him, never taking that intense gaze from Barton's face. If he didn't know better, he might have worried that the bigger man was sizing him up for a body bag.

An hour later, as V slammed him back to the mats for the twelfth or thirteenth time, once again driving the air from his lungs, Barton began to wonder what had convinced him that he might even stand a chance of holding his own against this guy. It wasn't like V had set out to pound him into oblivion, if anything he had probably held back at first, making sure that Barton was fully warmed up and ready to face what was coming at him, but going a couple of rounds with the guy was a lot like sparring with Thor. He'd had to adapt quickly, falling back on old habits had let him fall into the exact trap that she had warned him about but he liked to think that he had managed to hold his ground for the most part, at least until V decided to really up his game.

"Maybe its time to call it a day guys," Titian suggested, curled up in the same chair she'd started out in. It would have been easy to believe that she'd been sitting there reading a book but he knew that she'd been watching them with interest, particularly on the occasions when he had managed to get the upper hand. "I'm going to head upstairs and take a shower, maybe if you guys did the same we could make ourselves presentable for lunch out in public?"

V reached down, helping Barton back to his feet and pulling him into a one armed, shoulder clapping hug. Though it wasn't something that many agents at SHIELD would have done, he took the move as a sign of respect. They stood side by side to catch their breath, watching as with a swish of her hip, she sauntered off up the staircase. Barton found V looking at him when he turned away, his expression filled with a curiosity that made him feel once again uneasy. "Something on your mind?" he asked, turning away to start picking up the training mats.

V shrugged, "just trying to figure out what's going on with you two."

Clint didn't know what she had told her brother about their 'relationship', sure he knew that V was aware that he'd saved her last year when a job went sour but as for the rest of it... He wasn't sure what he thought of potentially having a guy like the one in front of him disapprove of something he'd done. "Just friends," he replied going for what seemed like the safest option. "She's helping me deal with some stuff."

"Yeah the nightmares, I know." There was no judgement in V's tone as he said the words. He turned, lifting two of the mats easily beneath his huge arms and carrying them to the closet where they were stored. "She doesn't usually do that you know? Bring people close, make them friends."

"She told me a little bit about the past, about your father..." he admitted. "I got the impression that relationships are hard for her because she's always worried about losing people." He didn't miss the surprised expression that fleetingly passed over V's face, an expression that could have been easily missed had he not learned to read some of the micro expressions that the man exhibited.

"Doesn't usually talk about that either," V mused, scratching the back of his head. "Tish, she's not had the easiest of lives, you get me?" Barton nodded. "It's not paranoia either, we've spent most of our adolescence in hiding and we lost people over the years, friends, family, lovers... this life we lead doesn't come with any promises. The only thing we get is the guarantee that one day you and everyone around you will die – probably violently too."

"Yeah I know something about that," Clint admitted, finding himself once again under the intelligent gaze of the other man's blue eyes. "You guys are the only people who look at me since New York without making me feel like I'm being judged, here I can breathe. Titian, she just treats me like she always did, this is the only place I can just be myself."

V nodded, seeming to understand exactly what he was saying. After a long moment they both moved away, collecting the rest of the mats and storing them away without speaking. Though there were no words, he knew that he wasn't the only one thinking about things, contemplating the strange family that the three of them had formed in recent days, all of them moving easily around one another as if they'd never been strangers.

They had moved most of the furniture back to its usual positions when V broke the silence. "I just wanted to let you know that whatever is happening with you two it makes sense to me," he announced. "I know my sister like I know myself and I know that she holds a lot back emotionally. She's scared of nothing in this world but failing to protect those she cares about and that's the reason that she keeps that list so short, but I haven't seen her smile the way she has since you've been here in a long time."

"Well I wouldn't get ready to welcome me to the family any time soon," Clint remarked drily, pushing the last of the sofas into place and straightening up, "she isn't interested in me in that way and it's probably a good thing given my current state of mind."

V smiled, his grin wolfish. Looking up toward the upper floor of the house, he planted his hands on his hips and inclined his head slightly as if mulling something over. "Wouldn't be too sure about that my man," he said finally. "I'll let you in on something, when she called out to me before we went at it, she told me to push only as hard as I thought you could handle but not to hold back. I didn't have to, hold back I mean, for a training session you did well and she was watching every move you made. Way I see it, she's testing you. Think of the little remarks she makes that would blow most people out of the water, she's confiding in you, she encouraged you to train with us this morning – it's a way of quietly checking out whether you're strong enough to survive being a part of her life. I'm not sure that she'd go to all that effort if she wasn't interested in the possibility of you sticking around for a while."

Unsure of what to say Barton lifted his own head to follow the line of V's gaze, trying to make sense of what her brother was suggesting. "You seriously think that she's testing the potential of a partnership?"

V turned to look at him, his expression neutral apart from the slight twinkle in his eye. "One thing I've learned over the years, never underestimate Tish's ability to surprise you or her ability to surprise herself."


	7. Chapter 7

_**A.N:** This story started as a 1000 word one shot and has kind of grown into something bigger. If you're reading or following this, I'm still trying to figure this one out in my head. Clint and Titian are easy but Clint without Natasha is difficult to write since she's such a huge part of his life. If you're reading I'd love to hear what you think so far...  
_

_A special thank you to Grace, who I can't PM to thank for her kind words ;-)_

* * *

"So let me get this straight, you want me to go on a job with you?" Barton asked eyeing her sceptically from the doorway of her bedroom. Titian moved around the room, tidying areas that didn't really need tidying. He wasn't stupid, he knew that she was giving him time to consider her proposition without scrutiny. She understood him well enough to know that he would need time to weigh up the pros and cons of the situation before giving her an answer.

It had been months since he had accepted a mission ,and he wasn't sure that it was a good idea to start with one that could be considered freelance, but he had to admit that he was intrigued by the prospect of working alongside her. Of course, if any of his colleagues at SHIELD discovered that he had worked freelance with a woman who had been dangerously close to being branded an enemy, he would be in serious trouble. "It isn't a kill order," she told him as if that were his only concern. She kept her face turned toward the window as she straightened cushions on the window seat. "I have a contact who has some information about a stolen artefact I've been hired to locate, I just need someone to watch my back while we meet."

The strategist in him could see the advantage to having a second pair of eyes on a meeting, it was always wise to have backup in case anything went awry. He was used to working with a partner, had done this sort of things a hundred times or more; that made him a good choice for the job. Honestly he was just more than a little surprised by the offer.

V had left three days earlier with a promise to return in a couple of months for a social visit. Although it was nice not to have to ignore her brothers pointed remarks and raised eyebrows whenever he and Titian interacted, he genuinely missed having him around the place. Despite his penchant for brutal, crack of dawn training sessions, he was a good guy and his influence over his sister was not to be taken lightly. It was becoming increasingly clear that Titian herself was feeling the loss of her brother's presence, she'd been quieter since his departure, her mood a little darker than he was used to as she once again found herself separated from her blood by events beyond her control.

"You're tracking down stolen property?" the surprise in his voice was obvious even to him. He had never considered that an assassin of her calibre, whose services had been in such demand, might take on other jobs from time to time, especially jobs like the one she seemed to be describing. It shouldn't have been a surprise, not really, he was a soldier and an assassin but he had other talents. Natasha was a spy but espionage was not her only skill set.

"Retrieval work pays well," she told him seriously, glancing over her shoulder in his direction, "and the clients don't usually try to have me killed if someone else expresses an interest in my skills."

He turned the possibilities of her proposition over in his head, considering the potential for things to get out of hand, weighing the challenge against the potential drawbacks. "Where is this meeting taking place?" he asked.

"There's a fund-raiser tomorrow night, lots of rich people in diamonds sipping cocktails, that kind of thing," she explained. "My contact works as an appraiser at the museum where the event is taking place. We go in as guests, I meet with him, get the information and then we leave."

"And how do we get in?" he asked, knowing exactly which fund-raiser she was talking about, he'd attended it as protection detail for a state senator a few years back. The annual event at the Natural History Museum attracted prominent businessmen, political figures and socialites from across the state of California. Invitations were difficult to get hold of and security was heightened for days leading up to the event, there was no way that they could just walk in through the main entrance without being challenged. "Security will be tight."

She smiled at him, moving to the dresser against the far wall and removing a creamy coloured envelope from the top drawer. "Well since you ask, I have an invitation and it invites me to bring a plus one. In this scenario that would be you."

When he didn't agree immediately, he saw her expression falter slightly. She dropped the charm offensive and shrugged her shoulders slightly, dropping the envelope onto the bed. "Come on Barton, cut me a break. Even if V was here we couldn't pull this job together for reasons that should be obvious."

He considered that for a moment, imagining the reaction of LA's high society to the brother sister pair. They were a striking pair, exotic, the kind of people who would attract attention wherever they went. It wasn't just V's size that set him apart from the crowd but the angles of his face and the way he moved, too much predatory grace to go unnoticed, even in a crowded room. Titian herself drew too much attention, she was a beautiful woman and both men and women could feel intimidated by that. Alone they could potentially go unnoticed but together they were unmistakably different to those who moved around them, from their apparent ability to speak without speaking to that hint of accent that made every word Titian spoke seem like a caress to his ears. No, she couldn't have done this job with V, even if they hadn't both had a target on their backs.

"Fine," he agreed, remembering what V had implied about her testing him and wondering if this was somehow linked. "I'll go with you as long as I'm not expected to make nice with people whose idea of downsizing is only having one yacht."

She shot around the bed, planting a kiss on his cheek as a thank you before taking off out the door. When he heard her muttering to herself about getting him a suitable outfit, he swallowed a groan and told himself that he owed her. It couldn't possibly be as bad as he imagined, could it? It might even turn out to be fun.

The following evening he found himself pacing the lobby, one eye on the door while he waited for their car to arrive and the other on his watch. She had pushed and prodded him into a tux, complete with bow tie and he was already feeling constrained by the collar and cuffs. Apparently it was important that they blend in with the other guests at the function, something about locating her source and being able to draw him away without suspicion. Much as he enjoyed the opportunity to dress up now and again, he'd been hoping for something more casual since they were working and not socialising.

He had no idea what she was planning on wearing, she hadn't exactly kept it a secret but she'd also made no attempt to enlighten him. The only clue that had been that she had presented him with a pair of cuff-links set with emeralds, suggesting that she was perhaps wearing green or gold. Since by her own admission she didn't care for mirrors or spend a lot of time worrying about her appearance, he guessed that she would be wearing a simple cocktail dress, something that wouldn't impede her movement, something that would showcase those endless legs. As the sleek black car pulled up on the street outside, he turned and walked back toward the door to the lounge, hating the sound of the dress shoes he wore against the marble floor of the hallway.

"Car's here!" he called, tugging his cuffs into place and straightening his tie one last time. It had been a while since he'd had to go undercover like this for a mission and even longer since he'd attended a formal function as part of the job. He felt naked heading out without the comforting weight of his bow over his shoulder and the small knives that he had managed to hide about his person only made him feel slightly less than completely unarmed.

"Be right there," she called from somewhere above him. A few seconds later he heard her footsteps on the stairs, heels clicking against the marble, and turned to greet her. "Okay I think I'm good to go."

His brain shorted out on him as she stepped into the lobby, just forgot how to work entirely for a moment. The sight of her was like a blow to the chest, more devastating than any of the kicks or punches they rained down on one another during their daily sparring sessions. If he had thought she had the power to take his breath away before then he had severely underestimated her desire to see him squirm.

Her gown was emerald silk with a straight, full length skirt, perfectly complementing the pale gold of her skin and the dark hair that she had swept up off her back and neck using jewelled combs. The fabric plunged in a deep V at the front, rising to meet beaded straps that glittered as they swept over her shoulders, crossing in the centre of her back before swooping down to wrap around her slender waist. It was simple, elegant and on her absolutely stunning. As she stopped in front of one of the few remaining mirrors to check hair and adjust one of her earrings, he couldn't help but notice that the cut and fit of the gown accentuated every aspect of her body perfectly as though it had been made just for her.

"You look amazing," he managed to say, reminding himself not to stare. He forced himself to think of anything but how many pairs of eyes were going to be fixed on his partner for the night and just how difficult it was going to be to read the motivations of almost every man in the room. He extended his arm like the gentleman he was supposed to be and she took it, slipping her hand into the crook of his elbow as they headed out to the car. He noticed the emerald ring on her finger, its colour almost an exact match to the dress, and the slender gold band that sat beneath it. Searching for a safe subject he asked, "can you still fight in that if the need arises?"

She laughed and gave him a suggestive smile. "It takes more than a dress to stop me getting into trouble Darling," she chuckled. "You just try to keep up."


	8. Chapter 8

As it turned out, working with Titian had been a lot more fun than he had expected. After so many years working for SHIELD and rarely getting the chance to attend large functions without an important mission parameter in place, he had almost forgotten that sometimes a simple mission could also be fun.

To his surprise there had been no major calamities, they had accessed the party without any issues, socialised with some of the wealthiest society figures in California and collected the information that she had needed from her source. There had been no need for a security detail but he understood that she had felt better knowing that someone was watching her back, she was not after all the only person looking for the artefact in question.

The only minor inconvenience in the entire night had been a man who Titian knew from her forays into society when she was working a protection detail. Female body guards were still unusual and men would often have the woman stand in as a date rather than announce that he had a need for personal security to stay so close to him, he'd seen Natasha do similar missions on a number of occasions. The guy in question just wouldn't leave her alone, determinedly pursuing her until Barton had stepped in, politely but firmly informing the guy that she was a married woman. It was fortunate that the identities that they were using as a cover were in fact a married couple and that she had considered the details, wearing a ring on her left hand and providing him with one so that he could do the same.

As they chuckled at the affronted look on the guys face, he had let her lead him to the crowded dance floor, ostensibly to put distance between them and the small crowd who had watched their discussion with interest. Barton had always enjoyed dancing, possibly because he knew that he was good at it. Of course he would never admit that aloud. Non the less he found himself enjoying the opportunity to dance with a beautiful woman without having the ulterior motive of seducing her for information. As they whirled around the dance floor, he found himself appreciating the fluid strength in Titian's body, the graceful way which she moved. Leaning in close to talk to one another, he couldn't help but notice the way that their bodies fit against each other and the way that she moved with and against him as his hand slid around her waist.

"It's fine for you," she laughed, hitching the skirt of her gown up and hooking it over her wrist as they walked down the street, "you don't have heels to contend with."

Barton tightened his grip on her hand, enjoying the warm night air after hours in the air-conditioned comfort of the museum. He glanced down at her feet, trying not to notice the curves of her calves and ankles, and was relieved that men didn't have to navigate social events in the torture implements that were stiletto heels. They had certainly drawn some surprised glances when they opted to leave the car at the museum and walk home, but then he supposed it wasn't every night people encountered a man in a tux and a woman in a vintage silk gown walking along the streets so close to midnight, even in Los Angeles. "Want me to hail a cab?" he asked, half turning to look at her.

Titian glanced up and down the deserted street, shook her head and let out a laugh that made him feel ten feet tall. The ends of her hair were beginning to drop and loose strands fell to frame her face but she didn't seem to care, nor did she seem particularly concerned about what effect the walk home might have on her dress or upset about the fact that her shoes were apparently hurting her. Her laughter lit up her face making her grey eyes sparkle and her skin glow. "No, just hold up a sec so that I can take the damn shoes off," she laughed, hanging onto his arm while she slipped off a pair of shoes that matched the dress.

As they continued along the pavement she let him keep his grip on her hand and he shortened his stride to make sure that she could keep up in that dress. She was a little drunk he realised and so was he, but the champagne dizziness that they had cultivated in the two bars that they had visited after leaving the museum made everything seem pleasant, somehow softer. For the first time in months he realised that he was happy.

"So Franklyn came through with the information?" he asked after they had walked for a while in companionable silence. They weren't far from her house now and he found himself wishing that the night would continue a little longer, that the alternate reality that they had entered for the evening where he had felt like a normal guy didn't have to end. She might have been anything but a normal woman but it was easy to forget that when they were out together and it was one of the things he liked most about her.

She nodded, gesturing toward the small evening purse that he had carried since shortly after they left the last bar. "It's all on the memory drive in there," she sighed. "Apparently locating the item in question wasn't much of a challenge for a man of his abilities, such items appear on the black market from time to time and everyone needs a solid appraiser to validate a purchase."

"So that's it, job done?" He saw the answer in her face before she could vocalise it. The job wasn't over yet but at least she now knew where to look when she went to retrieve the item in question.

"Once I retrieve the item it'll be done," she offered him a graceful shrug of her shoulder. "I don't get paid until the client has what he wants."

Silence descended between them and Barton found himself turning over the possibilities of retrieving the artefact she was looking for. If the item was valuable enough to steal then it was unlikely to be left unguarded, if it was guarded then Titian would have to either eliminate the guards or steal the item back. He didn't doubt her skill but the idea of her walking into a situation where she would most likely be outnumbered and outgunned didn't sit well with him. "Will you need any help?" he asked eventually.

Titian's expression betrayed the surprise she felt, eyes widening a fraction even though she didn't turn to face him. "Are you offering?" she chuckled. Barton considered the feeling of her hand on his arm, the warmth that seemed to emanate from that one spot to fill him up. He shouldn't even consider it, he knew that, didn't seem to be stopping him though.

They were home now, the familiar scent of the jasmine and roses that she had nurtured throughout the summer and into early fall rising up to meet them as they stepped into the courtyard garden and headed for the French doors. Titian's home felt very much like a haven to him, the walled garden and the airy open spaces inside having become synonymous with safety in his mind almost the first moment he had stepped foot inside the place.

"If you need the back up, I'll go with you to get whatever it is you're looking for," he told her, surprised by how sure his voice sounded. He was throwing himself off a hypothetical cliff with the offer and they both knew it. Agents of SHIELD were not encouraged to look beyond the boundaries of their employer but he owed her something for all that she'd done for him and he'd feel better knowing that she had someone watching her back if the occasion called for it.

Surprising him yet again, she leaned into his side and rose up on her tiptoes to plant a chaste kiss on his cheek before dropping back to her usual height. "You're a good man Barton," she told him, "better than most in this failing world ..."

He felt her hand tighten on his arm a second before it fell away, the predator in her waking as she put some distance between their bodies. At first he was confused, wondering what he had done wrong but then he realised that her attention was no longer on their discussion but fixed on the far side of the garden and the solitary figure that sat before the doors, back against the door frame as if he belonged there. He tried to read the expression on her face but there was nothing for him to work with, wherever she had retreated to inside herself she had taken everything with her politely but firmly shutting him out.

The man on the doorstep was rugged and scarred, his face bearing the weight of a man who had survived many events that would fell a lesser man. His clothing was neither well-kept nor shabby but somewhere between, worn and comfortable but unmistakably that of a fighter. In both build and attitude he radiated purpose and the strength that came from years of experience but he didn't look too sure of himself. As he rose to his feet, his eyes fixed upon Titian who seemed to have sobered up entirely in the seconds it had taken for her to cross the distance to the terrace in front of the steps. She stared at the man in front of her, shoulders back, spine straight.

"Tate," she greeted him. Her voice made it clear that the man was not a welcome guest. Barton looked from the woman he knew to the stranger and wondered what it was that inspired her apparent distrust in the man before her.

Tate's gaze moved from the woman he had come to see to Barton himself, an appraisal and declaration of distrust. "I don't want any trouble," he explained, holding up his hands in the international gesture of surrender. Barton could recall at least a dozen instances when that particular statement had been a precursor to trouble; the words themselves now put him on edge. "Zoya sent me, we need to talk." Again the man's gaze moved toward Clint and then skittered away, obviously whatever he had to say he wanted to deliver the message in private.

Titian made no attempt to move the conversation indoors, nor did she ask him to leave. "Whatever you have to say you can say in front of him," she replied firmly, a determined tilt to her chin, "and you can say it out here."

Tate nodded but it was obvious that he was swallowing down an objection. Barton watched Titian, fascinated by the way she dominated the conversation while hardly speaking, by the sudden authority that seemed to seep from her pores and fill the air around her. It was almost as if the man before her, easily ten or fifteen years older, didn't dare risk angering or offending her in any way. He couldn't imagine that Tate felt that way often. Judging by the heavily calloused hands and the scars that seemed to criss cross his skin, he wasn't the kind of man to back down from a fight and she was considerably smaller than him. The man's discomfort was fascinating. "While you've been socialising with your new friend here," he looked pointedly at Barton and scowled, disapproval evident, "we've had news that one of Karei's men is planning to make a move against Jago or Siobhan. It's escalating, this thing that you and your brother have started, and Zoya needs to know what should be done in the event of an attack. Normally we'd ask V but he's off on a job somewhere ..."

"And you have no way of contacting him," Titian finished for him. "So here you are on my doorstep. You're sure that this is coming from Karei, the information is reliable?"

"We don't take chances," Tate announced gruffly, "not since we lost Gage. We know that you like to handle threats toward the family personally, that's why we're extending the courtesy."

Titian nodded her head, indicating that she appreciated the sign of respect that had been shown. "Jago and Siobhan know about this?" at Tate's nod she continued. "Talk to them and see what they want to do. The third safe house is empty, Zoya knows who to contact to get access if needed. If Karei's man gets too close then take him out. I know they can handle themselves but make sure that they don't have to."

"And when V gets back?" Tate asked, accepting her orders without question. "You know how personally he takes this stuff."

"Keep them safe and you'll hopefully never have to know just how personally we deal with this sort of thing," she told him calmly, a statement of fact rather than a threat. "I'll talk to V tonight." Tate nodded, shoving his hands into the pockets of his leather pea coat and moving off the steps and out into the open space of the garden. He was armed but had the sense not to draw the weapon.

"Nothing will get through while we're on watch." He sounded certain of that, sure of himself and his team. "I'll let you get back to your date ..."

Though she didn't react to the obvious disdain in the older man's voice, she put him in his place, turning those cold, bottomless grey eyes up at him as he drew level with her. She didn't reach out to touch him but the older man flinched slightly at whatever he saw in her gaze. "Don't let my choice of clothing or my surroundings imbue you with false confidence," she told him frostily. "I am every bit my brother's sister. You of all people should know exactly what I am capable of. Let us hope that nobody tracked you here Tate, that would be unfortunate for everyone."

The flicker of fear was quickly hidden but not quickly enough as Tate huddled down in his coat and continued on his way. Something had happened between them, something that had obviously left the older man wary of Titian and V. Rather than feeling sorry for him, Clint found himself curious about what his friends could have done to inspire such respect.

Titian didn't bother to turn as he walked away, merely throwing her words out over her shoulder. Calm, clear headed and chillingly cold. "V is not your only concern if you fail," she told him. Barton saw the older man tense, his shoulders bunching up beneath the leather of the jacket. "Make sure that you remind Zoya of that when you get back."


	9. Chapter 9

Throwing back the remaining vodka in her glass, Titian reached for the bottle and poured herself a refill. At her side, Barton took a generous swallow of bourbon and waited. Almost an hour had passed since they arrived back at the house and she hadn't stopped moving since, swapping her gown for track pants and a t-shirt as she gathered various supplies that were stashed around the house. He hadn't asked her anything and for that she was grateful, but she could see the questions in his eyes and she knew that she would have to explain some things. He was far from stupid and it wouldn't take him long to put together a story, it was important to her that he got the right one.

"I've told you a little about my family but I haven't told you all of it," she told him quietly, "our attempts to bring down Karei are bigger than V and myself, bigger than the adopted family even, we have a network of sorts, all similar minded people united by a common goal ..."

"Destroying your father and his operation," Barton finished for her, one step ahead despite the alcohol that they had both consumed.

"You have to understand that we don't think of him as our father, there is more to paternity than DNA. Biologically we are his but in all other ways we consider Jago to be our father, he raised us, trained us, taught us the values that we hold. Our lives have been nomadic but that was the only way to stay one step ahead of the people who were sent after us. The only thing that Karei gave us is reasons to wish him dead." She paused, sipped her vodka, grimaced slightly. "I left New York five years ago and set up on my own after a disagreement with one of the security team up there so it's unusual for them to reach out to me. The guy in question made a mistake and I was sent to put it right, it was an embarrassment that he didn't take lightly. A week or so later he sold out my location to some of Karei's fighters and they jumped me but it didn't work out the way he planned."

"It was Tate?" he asked, giving her his full attention.

Titian shook her head, "his son." She took another mouthful of vodka and pointed to a small scar on her left wrist, partially hidden beneath the design of her tattoo. "I walked away with that, a busted lip and a few bruises, none of them walked away at all. Tate's son didn't survive the encounter either but that was no fault of mine, doesn't mean that he doesn't blame me however."

There was no simpler way that she could have described the events that had led to her leaving her family and moving to the other side of the country. There was more to the story of course, none of which changed the story sufficiently to warrant divulging it all tonight. The finer details tended to rouse emotions that were better left alone, particularly when she was half drunk and feeling emotionally raw. Barton didn't need to know about the resentment that had been levelled at her or that many people within her own group felt resentment toward her for her fighting ability. As far as some people, including Tate, were concerned, she should settle for being the débutante of their order and leave the fighting to those who had proven themselves. Titian had never been the 'daddy's little girl' type and she'd had no intention of starting when she reached the age of fifteen and her face started to attract attention.

"So you struck out on your own," he remarked, pulling her from her thoughts.

"In a fashion," she told him, explaining further. She told him how she had gone against the wishes of her guardians and those who worked with them by taking work from outside organisations. She told him that she had done it to prove herself, putting herself into Karei's view and making sure that word spread that she was every bit as dangerous as her brother and that for the last three years she and V had been the names that were whispered among those who needed to make someone disappear. Her employers were just a means to an end, a way of making ends meet so that she didn't have to be financially dependent on her network of contacts. "If he was looking at me," she explained referring to her father, "then he wasn't putting all of his effort into looking for my brother."

"Except now it appears that he's found something else," he concluded. "He's not looking in your direction any more."

The words sent a shiver through her, one that she couldn't suppress despite the warmth of the kitchen and the burn of the alcohol in the back of her throat. The thought that something might happen to those she cared about was like a knife to the ribs, one that was being slowly twisted by an unseen hand. She knew that Zoya, a friend in whom she had the utmost confidence, would do everything in her power to make sure that things didn't get out of hand, that V would soon return from wherever he was and be able to watch over things as he had always done, but it didn't make her feel better about being so far away.

"You okay?" he asked when the silence had stretched out for what seemed like hours between them. She turned her face to look at him, wondering how a man with so many horrors of his own could find the space to care about hers, but he did care, she could see it in his eyes. Wordlessly, she shook her head. Right at that moment she was so far from okay that she couldn't communicate it.

Abruptly she found herself enveloped in his arms, her face pillowed against his chest as he offered her the comfort that she badly needed but hadn't known how to ask for. She shivered against him, the warmth of his skin leaching through his clothing and hers to chase away the cold. It wasn't in her nature to need protection from anyone or anything, a woman did not become a feared assassin without having the ability to shut away her emotions, but damn if his arms around her wasn't exactly what she needed. It should have bothered her but it had been a long time since she had trusted anyone enough to let down her guard even enough to enjoy a simple hug. Moments passed and Titian felt the worst of her shivers stop, his arms stayed around her but he said nothing as if he understood that words were not what she needed from him.

When she eventually pulled away, she threw back the last of the vodka in her glass and set it back on the counter. The burn of the alcohol was the only heat in her body apart from that which Barton had given her. "Whenever we're threatened in any way there's a standing order of what we're meant to do," she told him. "When we're under threat we stay put, stay alert and we wait for something to happen, we don't assemble until there's a reason to. We never know whether an attack is a bluff to lure us out into the open. It's foolish to have all of us in one place if there's going to be a strike made against us."

He nodded, appreciating the logic. "So who gives the orders?"

"Usually Jago, sometimes V, but they could come from others in an emergency," she replied. "This time I'm going to need something from you to make sure that I stick to that plan."

"Anything," he replied. No hesitation, no questions. It meant more to her than he could know that he was ready to trust her so easily.

"You're going to have to keep my mind off what's happening by making sure that I'm never alone, not for a second," she explained. "I need you to distract me otherwise I'm going to slip the chain and hunt down that damn assassin myself."


	10. Chapter 10

He had made her a promise and he intended to keep it. For four days Titian blocked out the sense of impending disaster that she felt by staying busy. At first her mind was occupied by planning and finishing her retrieval job, securing a generous pay-day from her relieved client. Those days were the easiest because she had something to concentrate on other than the potential of an attack against her family and friends. Working together on the task at hand it was easy to believe that Tate's visit had been an unpleasant dream and that everything was fine. When the job was over and she found herself with time for the thoughts she was trying to avoid to creep in, she became a lot harder to manage and her restless energy became almost contagious.

Despite the hours that they dedicated to training, sometimes sparring for up to three hours at a time, she remained restless and he had to watch over her constantly. She never relaxed and as a result neither did he. Even during the night, when she slept fitfully plagued by nightmares that kept them both awake, she found no relief from the crushing weight of premonition. Though he tried to help her she didn't want to talk about the things she saw when she woke up, preferring to keep her ghosts to herself. More often than not they were both up and moving before sunrise.

On the fourth night he was already awake when she bolted upright, alerted to the nightmare that she was experiencing by the change in her breathing and twitching of her limbs a short while earlier. It continued to feel strange to be sharing her bed but it was a sensible precaution when she herself couldn't guarantee that she wouldn't run out into the night and do something reckless. He had gone everywhere with her since the night of the fund-raiser and that included the spacious expanse of her bed. In the moonlight, he could see the panic in her eyes as she pushed her hair out of her face, the sheen of perspiration on her skin as she tried to get her emotions under control.

"You want to talk about it?" he asked, propping himself up to face her. When she turned her face toward his, he noticed the tracks of tears on her cheeks, the dark circles that told him more than any words could about the toll that the wait for information was taking on her. Her body was soft and pliant in his arms when he reached out and pulled her to him, struggles dying away quickly until she was curled up in his arms like a child, her body trembling in his grip. Barton found himself wanting to rock her, whisper words of reassurance and promises that whatever was haunting her it was only a dream but he couldn't. Nobody, least of all him, knew what the future held.

"It's always the same," she whispered. "There's a dark place, hands holding me down no matter how I struggle and they make me … they make me watch as they kill someone."

"Who?" he asked, listening to the pain and confusion that poured from her. "Who do they kill Titian?"

"That's just it, I don't know who it is, I can't see them, just the shape," she paused, heaved in a deep breath. "I can't see their features but I just know somehow that it's someone I know."

He certainly wasn't about to tell her that it was only a dream and that she shouldn't read anything into it. He of all people understood the effect that nightmares could have on a person and how real they could seem upon waking. Instead of words, he offered her the only comfort that he could, tightening his arms around her until her shivers stopped just as she had once done for him. He held her until her tears stopped and her body felt warm against his own, only then releasing her so that she could move away. She stayed put, cuddled into him, her arms around his waist and he reminded himself that though she might not ask for a hug when she felt that she needed one, the simple comfort of his presence could be enough to ease her when she was in pain. Tonight was definitely one of those occasions.

The shrill ring of the old telephone out in the hall a few minutes later brought all the tension that had eased from her muscles roaring back. She stiffened in his embrace, the quivering of her muscles the only thing to betray her anxiety. Barton turned his face to glance at the clock on the bedside table. Who the hell was calling at three-thirty a.m.? The implications of the late night call began to sink in and he felt a chill run over his flesh. Titian pulled away from him, moving quickly as she scrambled off the mattress and ran for the phone, undisguised fear in her facial expression.

From the bedroom doorway he watched as she reached the phone table on the landing and lifted the receiver. He wasn't close enough to hear what was said, more interested in her body language as she listened to whomever was on the other end of the line. The trembling began in her arm, the hand that held the receiver suddenly struggling to hold it to her ear, but it quickly spread through her body until he worried that her knees were about to give way. That was when he knew that he had to move. He didn't make it to her side before her knees gave out and she fell to the floor with a thud, phone held against her cheekbone but no longer to her ear.

With glassy eyes, she looked up at him as he crouched at her side. In all the weeks that he had lived in her home, through all the ups and downs that they had shared with one another, he had never seen her look so lost. Taking the telephone from her hand when he realised that the caller had hung up, he placed it carefully back where it belonged and waited. "That was Zoya," she murmured, "I need to find V and head North, there's been an incident."

He didn't like the expression on her face, nor did he like the way that all of her anger seemed to have bled from her being. This was not the woman he knew. Titian was and always had been a firebrand, defiantly throwing herself into situations that most sensible people would have avoided, a woman who challenged the fates and angels by showing no fear no matter what the world threw at her. "What happened Tish?"

The use of her brother's nickname for her seemed to pull her out of whatever thoughts were tormenting her, long enough for her to look at him and really see him at least. Without warning she twisted her body into his embrace, turning her face up to his own. Her kiss was part sob and part desperation, a declaration that was more a scream than a whisper. Beneath the press of her lips his circuits scrambled, brain stuttering as he tried to figure out what was going on, body responding to her without hesitation as she all but climbed into his lap.

With effort he pushed her away, holding her by the shoulders and fixing her with a look that must have surely conveyed his confusion to her. She didn't fight him at all, just sat there shaking in his hands, her eyes fixed on his while she fought to regain control of her emotions. It took her a moment to compose herself before she attempted to speak. "Didn't want to leave without doing that at least once."

He caught her meaning immediately, understanding that she was planning on leaving the relative security of LA and wading into the conflict that was obviously about to begin. "So it's started and you're going to run right into the path of whatever's happening up there?" he asked her, fighting to keep the unease he felt from showing in his voice. "Did you consider that could be exactly what they're counting on? You've barely slept in days Titian, it isn't good strategy to put yourself into a situation like the one you're bound to be walking into when you're sleep deprived and you know it."

"If I leave at sunrise I can be out of California and meet up with V by nightfall," she reasoned. "Zoya and the others will be focussed on getting the compound cleared and getting everyone to safety, V and I will just be there as backup, an insurance policy against unwanted guests."

He didn't like it, not one bit but he couldn't do anything about it, not without starting a fight with the woman who had taken him in and helped him to rebuild his shattered mind. That was how he found himself standing at the French doors at dawn, watching the woman in question striding across the flagstones. At the gate she paused for a moment, turned to look at him and offered him a slight smile, lifting her hand to the chain that hung around her neck and gripping it in her fist. She was pale beneath her make up, but there was a fire in her eyes that was almost a living thing, the desire to eradicate those who threatened her family eating at her until she had no choice but to act.

He had helped her to pack the clothing and weapons that she carried over her shoulder in V's black sports bag so he knew that she was well prepared for whatever the following days would bring. Non the less he absorbed the sight of that slight smile, the fondness that he saw beneath the anger in those smoky eyes. He drank in the sight of her, committing the movement of her hair and the elegant lines of her tattoos to memory as if it were the first time he had seen her. He etched the sight of her onto the canvas of his memory because in the moment before she turned and walked through the gate, he had the most horrible feeling that he might never see her again.


	11. Chapter 11

The best laid plans never ran as smoothly as anticipated and that had certainly been true of her journey to Dallas. When she had laid down the plan, announcing her intention to reunite with her brother and head up to the family compound in the Adirondacks, she hadn't envisioned any scenario where leaving would be so difficult.

It had been a long day and she was more than ready to crash for a few hours before they caught the bus out to Fort Worth the following morning. They were booked onto a flight to Burlington and would drive the rest of the way to join the others at the lake, converging on the Great Camp at a specified time which V was arranging with the others. As she moved through the alleyways to the hotel where she would meet her brother, she scanned the shadows, allowing her instincts free rein and keeping her favourite throwing blade close at hand. There were a number of shady characters lingering here and there, eyes following her movement as she strode between the buildings and sizing her up as a potential target. If any of her father's henchmen were looking for her they would find her a difficult target to find, since leaving LA that morning she had made several alterations to her appearance and she was confident that anyone looking for her would struggle to connect the brown-eyed blonde walking the shadows with the grey eyed, dark-haired woman they looked for.

As she might expect the hotel was far from luxurious but the clerk at the desk didn't ask too many questions when she told him she was there to visit the guy in room twelve. It was a well-known fact that motor lodge hotels were a popular place for illicit trysts between lovers so he probably assumed that she was either V's bit on the side or that he had hired her for the night. His lecherous gaze as he checked her out suggested that he considered her to be a worthy investment. Titian had to keep a tight rein on her temper to prevent herself from breaking his wrist when his hand strayed too close to her ass during the short walk to V's room, instead offering him a tight smile and firmly closing the door on him once she was inside.

The room was immaculate, the only lapses in his usual tidiness being the bottle of vodka and glass on the counter and a set of clothing that lay on the floor. Dropping the bag to the floor and pulling the blonde wig from her head, Titian glanced around the room, surprised to find that the place was cleaner than she would have expected, although whether that had anything to do with the staff or was all about her brother she didn't know. His room was on the end of the block and had a clear view of the parking lot and the entrance, meaning that nobody could get close without being seen by the surveillance system he had rigged up at the window. Digging through the top layer of the bag, she pulled out her toiletries and pyjamas and headed for the bathroom to take a much needed shower. Her plans for the rest of the evening involved getting clean, maybe ordering pizza and watching TV until V got back. She was absolutely not going to spend the remainder of the evening thinking about Barton. There was quite enough drama in her life right now without looking for more.

It was late when she woke up, the TV throwing light across the room while the only other illumination came from the dim lamp beyond the window in the parking lot. Momentarily disoriented, she jolted into a sitting position as her fingers closed around the handle of her gun. Taking in the surroundings, she waited for her brain to make sense of the hotel artwork and the impersonal furnishings that reminded her where she was. It was obvious that she was alone and there were no signs that V had returned while she slept. The unease was immediate and had her climbing off the bed and heading to the window. Two-thirty in the morning, where the hell was her brother?

She was a few feet from the glass when she heard the sounds outside the door. Soft footsteps, stealthy against the wooden walkway that ran the length of the building. Instinct took over as she stepped into the area of densest shadow to the left of the window, using the small laptop screen that was hooked up to the camera feed to watch the area outside the door. Heartbeat slowing and breath evening out, she rested her gun against her thigh and waited. Two men, both dressed in black, appeared on the monitor screen, moving slowly, carefully, as they approached the room. On the other side of the door they hesitated, both of them turning and looking out across the open space behind them. Something had spooked them, that much was obvious from their body language and the fact that they faltered in their approach.

Silently she waited, almost wishing that they would try the door. It was a safe bet that they were expecting her brother to be on the other side of the door and not her, but Titian had never been the kind of woman who let the stupidity of a henchman stop her from taking them down. Whether they were there for her brother or for her they were a threat. Threats were to be dealt with quickly and efficiently.

Finally she heard the clicking sound of someone trying the door knob, subtle as a gunshot in the silence of the room. She caressed the intricate patterns etched into the metal of her handgun, reacquainting herself with an old friend and wished that she'd decided to sleep in her clothes rather than changing into pyjamas. It didn't matter, she could fight just as easily in what she was wearing as she could in her usual gear but she might have looked a little more intimidating in leather or denim than in black yoga pants and a tank top. Still, the gun in her hand was intimidating enough for most people and she knew just how to use it.

The sound of lock picking tools followed the attempt to open the hotel room door, subtle scraping and clicking carrying into the room as one of the men worked on the lock. The second stood guard, head moving from side to side as he watched the parked cars that were in the lot. A click louder than the others announced the shifting of the lock mechanism and the two men shifted their position, the locksmith on the ground pulling a weapon from behind him and rising to his feet. She could imagine them initiating a count, preparing to storm the room and tackle her brother as he slept. Titian knew that she had one chance to take control of the situation and that it involved her being able to utilise the element of surprise as they came through the door.

As the door began to swing open, she held her position. The silencer of the lock pick's handgun came through the door first, weapon trained on the bed where she had been sleeping only a short time earlier. She waited until the first of the men was through the door and the second was about to follow and only then did she act. Moving swiftly, she kicked at the hand that held the weapon, sending it skittering into the shadows of the room as it left his hand. As he turned toward her, she threw her entire body weight behind a punch that connected squarely with his nose and then launched herself at the second when her first target dropped to the floor.

Tackling him by the waist and drilling him into the concrete, she landed on top of him and brought both hands around with enough force to make his ears ring. By taking the fight out into the parking lot she ran the risk of someone seeing them but she also limited the opportunity for her attacker to use the weapon in his hand. Sometimes being picked up by the police was the lesser of two evils. Hauling him up off the ground she threw everything that she had at him, using his size and strength against him so that she could twist him around and slam him into the wall of the motel. With an arm jacked up behind his back, she pinned him in place and leaned in close. "Who sent you?" she hissed directly into his ear.

The fact that he made no move to answer her jacked her rage so high that she could feel the tension in his shoulder as it threatened to separate from its socket. She twisted his wrist and slammed her booted foot into the back of his knee, forcing him off balance. A fist came at her from the left as the first of the men came at her again, the blow catching her at the temple with enough force to make her lose her grip. Spinning away, she twisted and came up fighting, dancing backwards to block whatever was coming at her, thankful for the years of training she'd had in taking blows from bigger opponents.

Pulling her dagger from the sheath at the small of her back, something she wore even to sleep when in unfamiliar places, she slashed upwards, connecting with the upper torso and shoulder of one of her opponents before grabbing the back of his jacket and knocking his legs out from under him. His head collided with the concrete with a crunch that should have made her flinch. She didn't have time to think about it before she was yanked to her feet and took another smash to the face, the kind that made her brain slosh around in her skull. Careering into the wall, she dropped the knife and threw her palms out to stop her face from hitting the brickwork. The next blow was an uppercut that snapped her head back and forced her to step backward. Stumbling, she tripped on a beer bottle and twisted her ankle, falling to the floor.

Stunned, she glanced around herself, reaching out to the side for the dagger that had fallen from her hand. Something flashed above her and she had a split second to recognise her own knife as her assailant raised it above her head. Playing the only move available to her, she got her feet under her, using her injured ankle as leverage and hammered her good foot into his chest. An arrow came out of nowhere as the guy stumbled back, plunging into the centre of his chest and sending him staggering back into the shadows where he fell almost silently to the ground. She tracked him, trying to ignore the starburst of pain in her skull as she turned, needing to make sure that he wasn't getting up again. The last thing that Titian saw before she lost consciousness was an archer dressed in black on the rooftop opposite, bow raised and ready to defend her to the death, and then there was nothing.


End file.
